operation, as any one that has observed it knows; three times a day she has to cook, and often to collect the fuel from the hedges, and twice she must walk, through all weathers, to carry this sorry meal to the man, let him work at ever so great a distance. But the evil does not end here—this unwholesome food produces a whole tribe of stomach complaints, besides the constant attendant on insufficient nourishment, scrophula; and there probably does not exist in any part of Europe so sickly a peasantry as the Irish.'-p. 24.

In his concluding sentence Mr. Parnell has unluckily run his head against more formidable opponents than he probably considers us. Adam Smith, after some observation on the strength and beauty of the lower orders of Irish, observes that no food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suited to the human constitution.' And Arthur Young says, when I see the people of a country (he is speaking of Ireland) with well formed vigorous bodies, and their cottages swarming with children; when I see the men athletic and the women beautiful, I know not how to believe them subsisting on unwholesome food.' But Mr. Parnell seems to think that we have made common cause with the potatoe, and that while he abuses it he abuses us. There is, as our readers know, one deleterious effect which is sometimes jocularly attributed to the Irish potatoe; if there were no other ground for rejecting this vulgar notion Mr. Parnell affords a strong one; the most potatoe-eating of his countrymen could not exhibit a more inveterate disposition to blunder than this sworn enemy of the national root.-We will now, as on former points, not only avow all that we have said, but go a little further with Mr. Parnell, and tell him that the reasons he brings against the potatoe diet are the very reverse of those which in truth can be alleged against it. He charges it with being expensive and unwholesome-the common sense of mankind, the experience. of ages, contradict these assertions:-and, in truth, the evils which the use of this food is supposed to aggravate are connected with its cheapness and powers of nutrition. Indolence and want of foresight and economy are the chief defects of the character of the Irish peasant, and these dispositions are fostered by the ease, the certainty, the cheapness with which a sufficient quantity of potatoes may be produced and cooked for the sustenance of man, and by the effective nature of that sustenance, which renders any higher industry, or any more costly nourishment, unnecessary.

Human wants are the first, and, with the lower orders, the only stimulants of human industry, and when we concurred with Mr. Parnell in wishing that the Irish peasantry could be brought to improve the quality of their food, we did so because we disagreed altogether from his reasoning, and because we know from the his

tory of the whole human race, and from a contemplation of the distributions of Divine Providence, that our duties and our wants operate upon each other, that the morals of a people must be. founded in its industry, and that in proportion as man is relieved from the necessity of labour he is debased in the scale of existence. But Mr. Parnell maintains that bread and meat are cheaper than potatoes; potatoes, he says, must be dug, and taken to a river and cleaned, and boiled, &c.—whereas bread and meat cost no time or trouble.-This strange fallacy we have already exposed, but Mr. Parnell repeats it in his Letter, and enforces it with this grave argument that beef may generally be killed at Christmas for about 2 d. a pound, while potatoes at that season are 6d. a stone, so that six pounds of potatoes are about the price of a pound of meat. Now observe the accuracy of our economist!-he takes the cheapest season of beef and the dearest of potatoes, and then makes his comparison;-—and again—he reckons beef at the price it bears when, according to his own account, more than half the Irish nation never taste it, and he reckons that potatoes, when more than half the demand is diminished, will continue to bear their present prices. Those who are not acquainted with Mr. Parnell's works will scarcely believe in the possibility of such absurdity. Mr. Parnell's final attack upon us is conveyed in the following

sentences

The last hazardous assertion made by the reviewer, "that the Irish have always governed themselves," after exciting general surprize, must, I believe, have excited a general smile.

'This writer seems to me not to be able to explain clearly his own ideas. If he means, as he certainly must do, that the Irish have been the instruments of governing each other, he is perfectly correct, and nothing is more easy and common. India may be kept in subjection by seapoys, and the African slaves are best managed by African drivers.'-p. 29.

Mr. Parnell seems to us not to be able to explain clearly his own ideas; for, accusing us, in the first line of his sentence, of this confusion and incapacity, he in the very next retracts his assertion, and admits that we do understand and clearly explain our own meaning, and moreover that we are quite correct in the inference.If he means, as he certainly must, then he is perfectly correct,' and this is what Mr. Parnell calls not being able clearly to explain one's own ideas!

But let us examine the substance of our difference: Mr. Parnell accused the Irish of being filthy,'' lazy,'' tricky,' ' fraudulent,' 'thoughtless,' extravagant,'' drunken,' base,' cowardly,' and 'treacherous;' and he imputes these scandalous vices to their connexion with the English, whom he represents as cleanly, active, open, honest, prudent, temperate, loyal, bold, and generous;

and

and we naturally asked him how any man with a grain of logic or common sense could attribute these vices in one people to its intercourse with another which possesses all the opposite virtues? -Oh! replied Mr. Parnell, it is the fault of the English government. Nay, we rejoined, but Ireland for the last century has, in every thing that related to morals, manners, and domestic economy, (the points in which she is most deficient,) been governed by herself.'-p. 481. And to this Mr. Parnell replies by the passage just quoted;-first of all inserting the word always instead of 'for the last century,' and omitting the important limitation upon which the whole argument hinges, 'in morals, manners and domestic economy.' A bolder (not to use a harsher term) attempt at falsification we have never seen—and trivial as the difference, between always, and for the last century, may appear, it was not insignificant to Mr. Parnell's mind nor unimportant to his argument; for he had stated in the very preceding sentence, 'that to govern men ill is to make them slaves, is a clear process of reasoning held from Terence down to Sir John Davis, by whom it is applied to the case of the Irish,' p. 29. Now we admit that in Sir John Davis's time Ireland was not governed by herself; but Sir John Davis did not live within the last century, he having died, we mention it for Mr. Parnell's information, about 300 years ago.

The suppression is of yet more importance; because undoubtedly in great political measures, which are usually understood by the word government, the English cabinet may be said to have governed Ireland:—but we repeat it, (and Mr. Parnell, by calling his countrymen seapoys and slave-drivers, cannot refute us,) that the Houses of Lords and Commons, the Privy Council, the magistracy, the parochial clergy, being all Irish, the Irish must have governed themselves in morals, manners and domestic economy."

If Mr. Parnell means that all those authorities basely sold themselves to England, and misruled their native country under the corruption of England-he would only impute to his unhappy country one class of depravity more than he has already accused her of, but he would not overthrow our argument:-the Irish parliament may have been corrupt, and may have sold themselves, and may have betrayed the people that they governed; but they did govern that people, and they were Irish, and that was the whole of our assertion.

But, we totally deny his fact, to the extent, and for the purpose for which he states it: that there has been considerable misgovernment in Ireland we ourselves admitted;—but that the whole aristocracy of that country has for the last century deserved to be treated as African slave-drivers, we totally and in

dignantly deny. Mr. Parnell's own father was, for the most inportant quarter of that century, a public man in Ireland, for a great while a minister-no less than Chancellor of the Exchequer; was he a slave-driver? was he sold to English corruption? did he do nothing for the advancement of the manners, morals and internal economy of Ireland? We could go through a long list of names as pure and still more illustrious, but it is idle to put even the plainest questions to a person of Mr. Parnell's obliquity of understanding.

Mr. Parnell having censured our learning and approved his own, by defending Virgil's propriety, and coupling Terence with Sir John Davis, as Lingo does Heliogabalus with Jack the Painter, crowns his scholarship by finding that the Duke of Bedford and Earl Fitzwilliam are Brutus and Cassius.-He accuses us of omitting the names of these noblemen in our list of the viceroys of Ireland, in these gentle words:

And, to make the inversion of all moral and political judgment more striking, the names of the Duke of Bedford and Lord Fitzwilliam are omitted. Has the reviewer never heard of the memory of Brutus and Cassius being more forcibly recalled by the absence of their statues?' -p. 32.

We forgive Mr. Parnell his zeal for Earl Fitzwilliam, as we were inclined to do his praise of the Catholic priests, as a good electioneering manœuvre; but no electioneering or any other zeal, should induce a writer to suppress the words of his antagonist, and upon such suppression, to found a charge of the inversion of all moral judgment (by which we believe, he means justice). We confess that in our list of Irish viceroys we omitted these two noblemen, but we omitted also several others-Lords Buckingham, Westmorland, Camden, Hardwick, Whitworth, &c. -and we stated expressly, that in our list, we selected only a few,' and selected those who were now no more,'—and this we did to avoid all pretence for the very imputation, which Mr. Parnell has now made, of undue partiality.

We have now gone through every one of Mr. Parnell's charges as fully as our limits would allow; and now we ask has he substantiated one of them-grave or gay, light or serious-always excepting that unhappy error of mistaking him for King O'Tool? And has he given any thing like a defence of any one of that series of absurdities which has made his Maurice and Berghetta the jest book of the united kingdom wherever it has been read or heard of?

Having thus replied to our Critic, we think it right to add, that, with the exception of his electioneering flatteries, we really believe that Mr. Parnell's motives are sincerely honest-that

he

he would do good if he knew how-and that any blame which his works may incur should be attributed to his capacity or rather his incapacity. But he is certainly singularly disqualified by his mind and character from being a useful public man; as we could easily shew, were this the place for it, by the history of the three Bills (for we believe they never grew into Acts) which he introduced into the House during the last and present parliament.—In a word, whether advanced in a bill or in a novel, in sad reality or fantastic fiction, his theories are the wildest and yet the meanest,the most impracticable, and the most idle even if they could be put in practice, that we have ever witnessed. For these reasons, and because Mr. Parnell is a very likely person to go on writing, and very unlikely to discern the tendency of what he may write, we have thought it advisable to endeavour, once for all, to render his follies innocuous, and to enable our readers to form a fair judgment of what they may expect from any future attempt at domestic or general reform by this amiable but weak, this well-intentioned but extravagant gentleman, who hoped by the agency of a novel to eradicate sedition and potatoes out of Ireland, and who thinks that the example of his hero is, on the whole, beneficial to his countrymen, because, with the little faults of high treason and suicide, he combined a high and ardent love for short handled spades and long handled scythes.

ART. IV.-1. Facts and Observations respecting Canada and the United States of America; affording a Comparative View of the inducements to Emigration presented in those Countries: to which is added an Appendix of Practical Instructions to Emigrant Settlers in the British Colonies. By Charles F. Grece, Member of the Montreal and Quebec Agricultural Societies ; and Author of Essays on Husbandry, addressed to the Canadian Farmers. 8vo. pp. 172. London. 1819. 2. The Emigrant's Guide to Upper Canada; or, Sketches of the Present State of that Province, collected from a Residence therein during the Years 1817, 1818, 1819. Interspersed with Reflections. By C. Stuart, Esq. Retired Captain of the Honourable the East India Company's Service, and one of His Majesty's Justices of the Peace for the Western District of Upper Canada. 12mo. pp. 335. London. 1820.

3. A Visit to the Province of Upper Canada, in 1819. By James Strachan. 8vo. pp. 224. Aberdeen. 1820.

WE

E had occasion in a late Number to discuss generally the subject of emigration; but it is too important a topic to be speedily exhausted of its interest: and the public attention has

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been